


pitch black, sparkling

by mickleborger



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: F/F, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 15:50:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20156128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: sometimes you just wanna do your crime without the associated daedra on your asssometimes you're even successful





	pitch black, sparkling

**Author's Note:**

> (Cellar Daring, "Love")

i.

She remembers the dull_ thud-thud_ of her bare feet on the planks of the marketplace, years ago, as she scrambled to catch sight of the departing caravan. They were always kind, those khajiit, and even at eight Astrid knew enough about her city that she could not understand why they were any less welcome in Riften than anyone else. She remembers Maven, who on the day in question was eight and a _half_, trying to explain. She doesn't remember what was said, but she has it firmly filed as one of the reasons only one of them belongs to the city now.

She knows Maven has been performing the Black Sacrament and received no response. She knows Maven has been flaunting her connections to the Brotherhood as if they amount to anything more than Delvin's questionable business practices and the memory of hands held in secret under a bridge in the city in a time it called them both _daughter_. She knows, as she knows many things through the network of little spies she must share with the Thieves' Guild in the silence of their respective patrons, that this theatre is just as effective as the Brotherhood would be, and for a much lower price.

She does wonder, shoed feet on the edge of the bottomless pool outside her Sanctuary, if Sithis has a clear enough presence to hold either of them accountable in the Void -- and if it is her silence or Maven's fanfare that will be held most at fault. The answer _should_ be obvious.

ii.

In the summer between Maven's sixteenth birthday and her own, a courier brought her a letter from Bravil. It was penned in the hand Maven was making everyone suffer reading, midway between her natural messy scrawl and the calculatedly elegant print she would grow to use on her leases and cheques and threatening notes left bloodstained and unmailed on her basement floor. Astrid knows it so well the formal notes are almost illegible.

Maven scribbles with disdain about the discolored statue in Bravil. "Lady Luck", the letter calls it, Maven's eyes rolling audibly in the distance. The letter is worn with age but this dismissive passage is carved into Astrid's heart, immutable as parchment cannot be, steady as the statue of the Lady (that Astrid knows was nothing _but_ lucky) was _not_ when the War came in the third winter after the letter, when the elves came with their horror of all things born in shadow, and the means to burn them out, and the will to tear them down.

iii.

She isn't convinced these days that she was _given_ Shadowmere with his eyes of flame and his too-long legs that go deep into the pool where all light is swallowed. When the last leader of the Sanctuary handed her the reins, she had thought simply that this thing in the shape of a horse was unbound; and when the last leader did not return, leaving the title of Speaker on the forest floor with the spriggans, she thought nothing of it.

Now she feels a wheel turning like that of a mill, and the reins are slipping from her hand into another's, and the starless mass in mockery of an animal is flying away from her. It happens too quickly. It is only later, in a sanctuary that now feels the wrong kind of dark and not at all safe, that she notices the absence; as if something, moving the same way she would on the boardwalk in Riften, had brushed past her and taken something of hers with it.

iv.

Neither she nor Maven fought in the War proper, preoccupied as they were with casting off the gods of their trades, drowning themselves in murky pools that reach much too far down and right back into the arms of things that might not even be gods at all. Maybe some purses found their way to Bruma, to cousins not meant to have them. Maybe Falkreath has a few more dead than her people know. A veil of shadow over the Jeralls like shifting silks, rolling clouds; and in glimpses between them the flash of cold blue-grey like steel and the autumn sky. They did not fight in the War. The War was not wild enough for their mountains.

Nonetheless there came a silence from the south for them both, creeping, like candles winking out one by one. The War never crossed the mountains, they said; but it lapped against them like a wave behind which was ruin.

The mountains, white with snow and gold with the glancing light of dawn; on one side haunted and shrieking; on the other fey and buzzing. They say the War never crossed these mountains -- but counting is Maven's business, and death is Astrid's.

v.

She realizes too late what brings the death of the assassin, the clawing despair that leads to carelessness, the Void blinding her as she never had to blind Shadowmere. She does not see the curve of her own blade in her own hand, does not hear the tramping hoofbeats of the not-animal that swallowed her soul long ago.

She is thinking of years of letters left unanswered, of questions replied-to only by moonlight in places she ought not be. She thinks of a pool of blood seeping out from under the door, into the garden. She has not stepped foot in the city in ages, as if hard times were not already shared between them, as if all her faith and superstition had soured into fear.

(Of course it had. She hears Colovian oaths on Colovian tongues in the other side of the door and when she looks at her blade at last sees only a pale face with paler eyes touched by the Niben. Of course there is only fear.)

Something is calling her home.

vi.

There were trips that took her away, of course, but Riften was always there; they belong to each other. This is why it took such an act of will to not throw her wine at that warmongering pretender with his _I belong to Skyrim_. This is how she knows that something has come into her city.

The priests will remark on the movement of crows, on how they seem different this year. The caravans with their prayers to twilight take a moment to acknowledge the sibling that follows. The thieves are quicker, quieter; the scuffles in the marketplace at dusk cease. The guards always seem to have their gaze averted. Even the drone of the bees seems at once both muffled and roaring, like a waterfall behind which anything, _anything_ could be happening.

Maven knows what it is. She seldom goes to the Ratway these days.

A raven lands on her windowsill just as she lifts her hand to snuff her candle, watching her. Against the sky it is almost invisible, but through the veil of the city it sticks out like a weed in the cracks of an old crypt. It seems aware of this. It almost seems to nod at her. She stares it down with an imperious weariness, and as she firmly pinches out the flame it winks out of sight.

She has always been home.


End file.
